"Grapple" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Crawley was almost beside himself, and was altogether at a loss how to bring in the matter on which he wished to speak. He had expected to find a man who in the hurry of London business might perhaps just manage to spare him five minutes,—who would grapple instantly with the subject that was to be discussed between them, would speak to him half-a-dozen hard words of wisdom, and would then dismiss him and turn on the instant to other matters of important ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... One ball crashed into the planking close beside my hand, hurling a splinter of wood against my face. The boat gave a sudden tremor, and, with a quick, sharp cry of pain, the negro next me leaped into the air, and went plunging overboard. I flung forth a hand in vain effort to grapple his body, yet never touched it, and everything about ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... was possible for them to fall in regard to the rotundity of the earth and gravitation, in no wise retarded the development of their art; the solidity of their buildings and accuracy of their aim was not affected by it. But sooner or later they were forced to grapple with phenomena, which the supposed parallelism of all perpendiculars erected from the earth's surface rendered inexplicable: then also commenced a struggle between the prejudices, which for centuries had sufficed in daily practice, and the unprecedented opinions which ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Foreign investors remain attracted by the country's political stability and high education levels, and tourism continues to bring in foreign exchange. Low prices for coffee and bananas have hurt the agricultural sector. The government continues to grapple with its large deficit and massive internal debt. The reduction of inflation remains a difficult problem because of rises in the price of imports, labor market rigidities, and fiscal deficits. The country also needs to reform its tax system and its pattern of public expenditure. Costa Rica recently ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... are fettered by misapplying it, or by straining it too far; being incapable of perceiving when it ought to yield to one of higher order. In it are found critics too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him; men, who take upon them to report of the course which he holds whom they are utterly unable to accompany,—confounded if he turn quick upon the wing, dismayed if he soar steadily 'into the region';—men of palsied imaginations and indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... reform which would deal with an elaborate system of evil cannot, therefore, be confined to treating consequences, the separate instances of the system. There must be a power which can go behind these and grapple with causes. There must, therefore, be something more than a court. There must be a commission, a department of government which will provide organized supervision and inspection against which the quasi-public corporation ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... headfirst to grapple with him, there was a sharp report, a lurid gleam of flame in the darkness, and Mohammed Beyd rolled over and over upon the floor to come to a final rest beside the bed of the woman he ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... were at the same time appeased: but, as a counter-irritant, the absence of the Emperor so far in the north-west brought about rebellion at Jaunpur. It was clear that up to this time—the end of 1566—Akbar had been unable successfully to grapple with the important question how to establish a permanent {103} government in Hindustan. The eleventh year of his reign, counting from the battle of Panipat, was now closing, and he had fixed so few roots in the soil that it was certain that, should a fatal accident befall ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... erected himself, and again sprang forward; but this time the impetus given to his body was not so great; and, although he succeeded in closing with the young hunter, the latter was enabled to keep his feet and grapple with him in an erect attitude. Had he fallen to the ground, the bear would have made ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... very small a portion of the human race think much, or think with any clearness when it does become the subject of their passing thoughts at all We too well know our own ignorance to venture on dogmas which it has probably been intended that the mind of man should not yet grapple with and comprehend. To return ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... return in full to that world they had left, or even to take part in the affairs of this. Surely their case was far worse than his, for after a few years he would be freed from the bondage of matter, and would grapple with the mysteries which had become so fascinating; but with them it was different. Unfitted for either world, without a friend and alone, they must drag out their weary existence until the law of Karma was satisfied. ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... sometimes to the bravest—dormant sense impressions, running back to the cave age and beyond, become active, harry the mind with subtle, unreasoning qualms—and she was a girl, brave enough, but out of the only environment she knew how to grapple with. All the fearsome tales of forest beasts she had ever heard rose up to harass her. She had not lifted up her voice while it was light because she was not the timid soul that cries in the face of a threatened danger. Also because ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... other blankly, two children face to face with one of the most terrible of modern social problems, aghast at their powerlessness to grapple with it. It is a situation which wrings the souls of the strong with an agony worse than death. It crushes the weak, or drives them mad, and often brings them, fragile wisps of human semblance, into the criminal dock. Shame, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... Scammon three or four of them do not hesitate to grapple with the largest baleen whale; and, as described by Dr. Murie, "the latter often, paralysed through fear, lie helpless and at their mercy. The killers, like a pack of hounds, cluster about the animal's head, breach over it, seize it by the lips, and haul the bleeding monster ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... form by themselves in one quarter to make and meet charges, and the light horse in another quarter to support, pursue, and harass[3] so in a fleet, the captain-general ought to order the strongest and largest ships to form in one quarter to attack, grapple, board and break-up the enemy, and the lesser and weaker ships in another quarter apart, with their artillery and munitions to harass, pursue, and give chase to the enemy if he flies, and to come to the rescue wherever there is ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... resurrection. [194:20] When the apostles surveyed the humble individual with whom they were in daily intercourse, it is not extraordinary that their faith faltered, and that their powers of apprehension failed, as they pondered the prophecies relating to His advent. When they attempted closely to grapple with the amazing truths there presented to their contemplation, and thought of "the Word made flesh," well might they be overwhelmed with a feeling of giddy and dubious wonder. Even after the resurrection had ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... dates was accompanied by a vivid imagination, an inaccurate memory, and a constitutional inability to deal with hard facts. Hence, her biographers have found it no easy task to grapple with the details of her career, her own picturesque, high-coloured narrative being not invariably in accord with the prosaic records gathered from contemporary sources. For example, according to the plain, unvarnished statement ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him melt away in the death grapple. With such heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned. The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous. The vast preparation of men and warlike material,—the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... efforts to supplant the lawful mate and gain possession of the unfinished nest. There was a battle fought about the premises every hour in the day for at least a week. The antagonists would frequently grapple and fall to the ground, and keep their hold like two dogs. On one such occasion I came near covering them with my hat. I believe the intruder was finally worsted and withdrew from the place. One noticeable feature of ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the Jew killed himself. There was a grapple hand to hand, and a wrestle. The Jew fell undermost, and was ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... she sped to the bed, unconsciously pushing aside the women who, almost frantic with fear and quite out of their bearings, were doing their best to grapple with the problem of life or death so suddenly ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Hoover declared in an address before the American Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and stability of our people would advance three ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... passed his sword through and through the largest, and in its fall the wounded monster turned and bit savagely at the fore leg of a companion. The bone cracked as a rotten branch snaps underfoot, and in another moment the two animals were rolling over and over, locked together in the death grapple. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... about half-way up to the top of the water, I put my right hand on the head of a man who was nearly exhausted. He wore long hair, as did many of the men at that time; he tried to grapple me, and he put his four fingers into my right shoe, alongside the outer edge of my foot. I succeeded in kicking my shoe off, and, putting my hand on his shoulder, I shoved him away: I then rose to the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... utterly beyond and outside all he knows or invents of good and bad, and can never have any concern with his good or his bad. It remains the pathway and territory of powers and mysteries, thoughts and energies on a gigantic and elemental scale; and that is why the mind of man can never grapple with the unconsciousness of the sea or his eye meet its eye. Yet it is the mariner's chief associate, whether as adversary or as ally; his attitude to things outside himself is beyond all doubt influenced by his attitude towards it; and a true comprehension ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... name derived from the Anglo-Saxon paad or petthian, or the Greek [Greek: pateo]? All the etymologists are silent; Tooke and Richardson ignore the problem; and of the innumerable pamphlets in the Worcester and Webster Controversy, loading the tables of school-committee-men, not one ventures to grapple ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... together. "Poor misguided child!" she murmured to herself pityingly; "just as she was developing a vocation for serious things! But perhaps if is all for the best. I doubt if she would ever have had breadth of mind to grapple with the great problems ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... in mid caracoling To send the emperor's greeting smack through the panel of oakwood[15] 70 That makes the poor man so hard of hearing imperial orders. Arts such as these and others, the use of the sabre on horseback, All modes of skill gymnastic, modes whether forceful or artful, Of death-grapple if by chance a cannon-shot should un-horse you, All modes of using the limbs with address, with speed, or enormous Effort of brutal strength, all this did Harry Delancey Teach to his docile pupil: and arts more ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... convinced Lee that he could toy with the Potomac army no longer, and this was more than ever impossible after Grant took command. Then Greek met Greek, and the death grapple began. At the Wilderness, at Spottsylvania, and most mercilessly of all at Cold Harbor, Grant drove his colossal battering-ram against Lee's gray wall, only to find ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... as if she were helpless to grapple with his meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: "I don't believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are a very ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... met me when translating the Welsh sacred and spiritual poems which form the second division of this volume. But they have been more easy to grapple with—in part because I have had more assistance in dealing with the older Cymric poems from my lamented friend Mr. Sidney Richard John and other Welsh scholars, than I had in the case of the early Irish lyrics—in ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... Herr Erchardt to me, "for one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open air—one SHARES the same joys—one feels friendship. What is it your Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried—grapple them to thy soul with hoops ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... Temple, the friends agreed to meet at the office between four and five o'clock. Hector Merlin would doubtless be there. Lousteau was right. The infatuation of desire was upon Lucien; for the courtesan who loves knows how to grapple her lover to her by every weakness in his nature, fashioning herself with incredible flexibility to his every wish, encouraging the soft, effeminate habits which strengthen her hold. Lucien was thirsting already for enjoyment; he was in love with the easy, luxurious, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties, which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government;—they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing, and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... hierarchy of inferior officers, whose respective duties are defined, and to see that they can perform and do perform those duties. But a private bank of the type usual in London has no such officer. It is managed by the partners; now these are generally rich men, are seldom able to grapple with great business of detail, and are not disposed to spend their whole lives and devote their entire minds to it if they were able. A person with the accumulated wealth, the education and the social place of a great London ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... lost in Africa and this ancient mother still rise bloody but unbowed. The realization of the vision, however, would call for capital on a scale as vast as that of a modern war or an international industrial enterprise. At the very outset it would engage England in nothing less than a death-grapple, especially as regards the shipping on the West Coast. If ships can not go from Liverpool to Seccondee and Lagos, then England herself is doomed. The possible contest appalls the imagination. At the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... (Enion), whence also Binyon and the local-looking Baynham. Onion and Onions are imitative forms of Enion. Applejohn and Upjohn are corruptions of Ap-john. The name Floyd, sometimes Flood, is due to the English inability to grapple ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... had filled many positions of trust in the South. Yet Dr. Le Grand was both unassuming and undemonstrative. He looked for and expected a clashing of races on election day in Wilmington, but that which took place on the 10th of November was far more than he was prepared to grapple with. The dawn of that fatal day found the streets of Wilmington crowded with armed men and boys, who had sprung, as it were, by magic from the earth. Aroused by loud noises in the neighborhood of his residence, the minister arose early, dressed and hastened into the street. A large crowd of colored ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... precariously that commanding hold on the others, which is essential to the good order of the soul. Our constitution is like a machine in which there is a constant liability of the secondary wheels to be thrown out of the catch and grapple of the master one. And worse than so, these powers which ought to be subordinate and obedient to the understanding, are not left to stand still when detached from its control. They have a strong activity of their own, from the impulse of other principles: indeed, it is this impulse ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... inland from Kalaupapa is the leper village of Kalawao, which may safely be pronounced one of the most horrible spots on all the earth; a home of hideous disease and slow coming death, with which science in despair has ceased to grapple; a community of doomed beings, socially dead, "whose only business is to perish;" wifeless husbands, husbandless wives, children without parents, and parents without children; men and women who have "no ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Danish Duchies, was adopted in England solely from the dense and inconceivable ignorance of the British mind on all German topics, and the equally inexplicable but inborn dislike of all British politicians to grapple with any serious study ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... you take even those English authors whom we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance, and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as though ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and four palmed claws at the other.—Fire grapnel. Resembling the former, but its flukes are furnished with strong fish-hook barbs on their points, usually fixed by a chain on the yard-arms of a ship, to grapple any adversary whom she intends to board, and particularly requisite in fire-ships. Also, used to grapple ships on fire, in order to tow them ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... fall on my face, For methinks 'tis you are my father, And for fear lest men of Eire should see Me retreating from your fierce grapple." ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... an immense army of young men and women being trained in the very best manner in every section of the South, to go forth to grapple with the great problems before them. He felt proud of being a member of so promising an army, and felt that they were to determine the future of the race. In fact, this thought was reiterated time and again by ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... own keeping. Well, he has come. Now, one way or another, he must be mine. We have great accounts to settle, and I want it done between him and me. If he remains in the ship we must board it. With our one little craft there in the St. Charles we will sail out, grapple the admiral's ship, and play a great game: one against thirty-four. It has been done before. Capture the admiral's ship and we can play the devil with the rest of them. If not, we can die. Or, if Gering lands and fights, he also must be ours. Sainte-Helene ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he would have gone about it in a business-like way, for he was quick to grapple with a problem, and solve it in short order. As it was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, one boy suggested a certain plan, only to have a second advanced as a better method of getting Noodles out ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... but it must be permanent. That is to say, it must not be merely a spasmodic effort coping with the misery of to-day; it must be established on a durable footing, so as to go on dealing with the misery of tomorrow and the day after, so long as there is misery left in the world with which to grapple. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... she developed him. He found that instead of being weak he was merely latent; that now the latent perceptions were unfolding. Since he had known her he had felt himself more of a man, more ready to grapple with facts and conditions on his own behalf, more inclined to take his own view of the world and to act on it. She had given him independence, for she had made him believe in himself, and belief in one's self is the first principle of independence. Bennington de Laney looked back on his ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... ideas are enunciated, and the repeated assertion that without them Darwinism is powerless to explain the origin of organic forms, renders it necessary to bestow a little more time on the explanations they give us of well-known phenomena with which, they assert, other theories are incompetent to grapple. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... backward by bodily strength. Both of us were sadly hindered by the sliding sand on which we strove. Twice I thought I had him, when my footing failed; and once he held me fairly uplifted from the ground, yet could not make the toss. 'T was a wild grapple, for when we had exhausted all the tricks we knew, it came to be a sheer test of physical endurance. Then, for the first time, I felt myself the master,—though he was a man, that gay French dandy, and never did my ribs crack under the pressure of a stronger ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... shock of an earthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by their hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch. And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these terrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of modern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dispositions of a Fabius, and, in our mind, Sir Robert Peel cannot do the public a greater service than to imitate the example of the Cunctator. He has the power, and, more than any living statesman, the practical ability, to grapple with such a subject in all its details. That Parliament must do something, is apparent to every reflecting man. The machinery of it cannot dispose, as heretofore, of the superabundant material. It must devise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... are of a good height, a fair-sized mirror might be fixed high up on the back, with some little contrivance in the way of a curtain which could be drawn over it; and aided by these we might be able to grapple ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... London Working Men's College has undertaken is a great work; indeed, I might say, that Education, with which that college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all those which lie ready to a man's ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... real thrones," he answered, watching the swaying bonnet, or perhaps, contrasting the muscular, bronzed hand he had placed on the chair with the smooth, white one which held the blue ribbons; a small, though firm, hand to grapple with the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... and I started off with enthusiasm notwithstanding the fact that Fuller, who was visiting me at the time, expressed only a tepid interest in my "theme." "Why concern yourself with forestry?" he asked. "No one wants to read about the ranger and his problems. Grapple with Chicago—or New York. That's the only way to ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that Mr. Douglass's remarks left her to defend the Government from the inferred inability to grapple with the two questions at once. It legislates upon many questions at one and the same time, and it has the power to decide the woman question and the negro question at one and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hopes; nor of the strange and motley crew he had summoned there from all corners of Europe to cut the trees; to build and launch boats; to sail them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his sword in English eyes, still chanting ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... preserving human life, if only as the result of her age-long experiences. That primitive maternal instinct, which has always been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtless promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and debase young girls, should ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... you believe it, Bob, that Mrs Rowbottom has wanted to grapple with me these last two years—wants to make me landlord of the Goose and Pepper-box, taking her as a fixture with the premises. I suspect I should be the goose and she the pepper-box;—but we never could shape that course. In the first place, there's too much of her; and, in the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... sub-sea scouts, sir. Just come back, after some delay. Her eye was smashed, and there are grapple marks on her. Must have been caught, and then slipped away. She was leaking badly. We got her through the lock just in time." Jim had evidently added a few touches of his own. "Comrade Pauloff seems to have been seriously injured. He's ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... dread of the words he had come to utter; a wild hope sprang in him that he might yet win her in other ways; he used language recklessly, half believing that his arguments would seem of force. His passion was in the death-grapple ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... made a rush, together, towards the man standing by the lady. Taken utterly by surprise, he discharged his pistol at random, and then sprang towards the door. Two blows fell on him, and Sankey and Fullarton tried to grapple with him; but he burst ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... few moments I felt paralysed, expecting each instant that I should have to grapple with an enemy; but, save for the whisperings and the distant roar of water, all was silent till ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... the invisible messenger that took the word across the boundary. He could not fathom the mystery, he could not picture to himself the missing link in the chain. As was always the case with him, his mind began at once to grapple with its problem—in this instance the riddle of the missing link. He actually forgot ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... exercised a great deal of self-control in resisting the natural impulse to cultivate a fad and grapple with a problem. Only her keen sense of humour saved her. On the Sunday following her return, while sauntering home after a long restless tramp about the city, she passed a church which many coloured people were entering. Her newly awakened curiosity in all things pertaining ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... concerned, if I have a preference at all, I think I am inclined to favour the Baffin's Bay route. I confess I should like to go over the ground traversed so painfully by former explorers, and see for myself the nature of the obstacles with which they have had to grapple. And I should also like to look with my bodily eyes upon the spots where they sought refuge during the rigours of the Arctic winter, and those other spots where, the forces of nature finally proving too great for them, they were reluctantly compelled to abandon ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... much doubt if that is its chief function or, rather, that its chief result is a wholesome quickening of the better nature of this poor man—that its chief accomplishment is to send him back to his home kinder, truer, and stronger, thru either the relaxation or the instruction, to grapple with the difficulties of life. I greatly fear that, as usually conducted, its influence upon the adult is at best but the temporary slaking of an unhealthy and never-satisfied thirst, and that upon the child ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... about overcoming any difficulties that might exist because of the current laws of the colony. But instructions to the royal Governor was one thing; putting these instructions into effect was quite another. Neither the Council nor the Burgesses were willing to grapple directly with land reform and no action was taken by the two bodies to implement the recommendations of the Board of Trade. Governor Nicholson on his own ordered that no more headrights be issued for the importation of Negroes. As to the sale of headrights by the secretary's office which Nicholson ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... can doubt that the hearty determination evinced by Masolino and Masaccio to deal with actual life, to grapple to their souls the visible forms of humanity, and to reproduce the types afterwards in new, vivid, breathing combinations of dignity and intelligent action, must have had an immense effect upon the course of Art. To judge by the few and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... been flung through the trap door, Joe had called himself every unpleasant name he could think of for his carelessness. If he had stayed at the door where he belonged, there would have been one of them left to grapple with Dan Cassey. Probably the two men who had been with Cassey when they had surprised him had not been anywhere around. They belonged to the type of criminal that always thinks of its own safety first. Probably they had not been anywhere near the barn. And if it ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... the sake of literary effect, I would not for one moment deceive them. It was not Charlotte; Charlotte had nothing to do with it, and did not even know of it. And yet—I will give them for a while this small problem to grapple with—Charlotte was quite well, was in possession of all her senses, was thoroughly enjoying herself, and was not outside the land of her inheritance. Most emphatically she had not ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... managed to get into the water, and the muzzles they were wearing did not prevent some hot fights. Two dogs which had contrived to slip their muzzles fought themselves into an icy pool and were hauled out still locked in a grapple. However, men and dogs enjoyed the exercise. A sounding gave a depth of 2400 fathoms, with a blue mud bottom. The wind freshened from the west early the next morning, and we started to skirt the northern edge of the solid pack in an ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... Ruffin, who now broke forth into a string of vindictive oaths and menaces, and appeared as if about to grapple me with his one remaining hand. At this moment he was called off by the men, who needed him in the "caucus;" and, after shaking his fist in my face, and uttering a parting ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... dogs of an elder day, Who sacked the golden ports, And those later who dared grapple their ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... of 1548 was an attempt of Charles V. and the Diet of Augsburg to grapple with this state of things, and was so far analogous to the English Act of Uniformity, and a precedent ...
— The Acts of Uniformity - Their Scope and Effect • T.A. Lacey
... cramp its expansion or fetter its usefulness. On the contrary they desire—while adhering, of course, to certain main lines of intellectual activity—to imbue it with such elasticity of adaptation as will enable it to successfully grapple with the changing necessities of changing times. The chief wants of to-day may not necessarily be the most pressing requisites of a century hence. Therefore, one of the greatest essentials—and at the same time one of the greatest difficulties—in ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... fight is close, desperate, deadly; it is yard arm to yard arm; it is heart seeking for naked heart, flashing eye to eye, visor down, and hot breath mingling with hot breath, as the foes close in the last grapple. The other idea is embodied in the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and is represented by the Federal authority. The South, then, is taken to mean the one, and the North, its opposite. On one side barbarism, slavery, injustice, ignorance, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... millions struggling upon the planet, were with him—down to the very thieves and mendicants. Yes, the thieves themselves were sure to be with him in his present work. The consciousness of universal support in his general activity heartened him to grapple with the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... of its best men. Finding himself weak from loss of blood, he deliberately unscrewed his head, threw it violently at the foe, and took him on the spine; down he tumbled; the veteran jumped upon him; fearful was the struggle; chest to chest, fist to fist; at last they joined in the death grapple, and dreadful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... to be said of him that his patients never died until his back was turned. It was not strictly true, but it conveyed something of the magnetism with which he wrought upon them. He knew the crucial moment by instinct, when to grapple and when to slacken his hold, and he ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... atmosphere was gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage; there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who were going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke. They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the digestion. They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... believed Madame to be an innocent person, the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details of her father's death as presented brokenly by Madame. Last had come a state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame. After that something had appeared to her in ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... slavery was one of the first with which the Company had to grapple, the Royal Charter having ordained that "the Company shall to the best of its power discourage and, as far as may be practicable, abolish by degrees, any system of domestic servitude existing among the tribes of the Coast or interior of Borneo; and ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... thick of this message she was, unluckily, caught by Dr Pughson, who, after dealing her one of his butcherly gibes, bade her to the blackboard, to grapple with ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... here, he heard discussed by expert opinion. Gradually he acquired an enthusiasm for the woods, just as a boy conceives a longing for the out-of-door life of which he hears in the conversation of his elders about the winter fire. He became eager to get away to the front, to stand among the pines, to grapple with the difficulties of thicket, hill, snow, and cold that nature silently interposes between the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... skipper to follow me close so as to run by me as soon as he sees the schooner lying at anchor. She'll come into sight all at once from behind the trees like, and whatever you do, run close aboard and grapple her. Her skipper'll have no time to show fight if you do your work to rights. I'm all of a tremble about it, I tell yew, for it means so much to me. There; my work's jest about done, and I'm going to run for the shore out of the way. I don't want ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... "what were you up to? If you are yearning to hit somebody, take a fellow your own size." He wrenched the stick from the man's grasp and threw it away. "Now," he said, "have it out if you will. I'm ready." He squared off, but the old man had neither strength nor desire to grapple with such a masterful opponent, and he slunk ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... all that the English admiral would not permit his people to board their ships, because they had such a number of soldiers on board, which he had not; their ships were many in number, and greater, and higher, that if they had come to grapple, as many would have had it, the English being much lower than the Spanish ships, must needs have had the worst of them that fought from the higher ships. And if the English had been overcome, the loss would have been greater than the victory could have been; for ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... lecture before them, and these I was glad to accept. Such lectures were of a much more general character than those given in the university, but by them I sought to bring the people at large into trains of thought which would fit them to grapple with the great question which was rising more and more portentously ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... child. I've been in too much awful earnest ever to be much amused again. No, I want to die in the harness. It's hard work I want. I couldn't have been tied down to a common, easy sort of life. I want something to fight and grapple with; and I'm thankful there's been a way opened for me to do good according to my nature. If I hadn't had sickness and death to battle against, I should have got into human quarrels, maybe, just for the sake ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... progressing sublimely through the broad, deep, and august channels of thought, became impeded by the meshes and clogs of intoxication, and were thus worse than prevented from exploring the regions of immortal truth! How many dallied with the sirens of the wine cup, until all power to grapple with great subjects was lost irrevocably! How many are the instances in the world's history of great minds debased and ruined by alcohol! Look back and around you at the lives of the brightest literary geniuses and see how many are under the spell of ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... twinkling of an eye the man had seized the wrist of the great ape, and before the other could grapple with him had whirled him about and leaped upon his ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... these two original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent of, those twin bases of ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... two inches of the bridge of his nose and in a remarkably firm and steady grip. Another glance showed him the figure of a second business-like looking young man at his side, whose attitude showed a desire to grapple with him. ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... how it ought to be, that is how Amy has seen it several times in the past week; and now that we come to the grapple we wish we could give you what you want, for you do want it, you have been used to it, and you will feel that you are looking at a strange middle act without it. But Steve cannot have such a room as this, he has only ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... Gloria lived through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night the wind, like a ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... not heard of the 'Trojan' Horse; With Seventy Men in his Belly? This Dragon was not quite so big, But very near, I'll tell you; Devoured he poor Children three, That could not with him grapple; And at one sup he eat them up, As one ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... you think the agents of the men we are to grapple with in the Canal Zone have been in this house to-night? If so, it looks like they were looking us up, instead of our being ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... went far to recover Jackson, who started up as if to grapple with the object of his hatred. Newton was on his legs at the same moment, and retreating, seized upon the handspike, which lay on the deck, close to where Jackson had been struck down, and placed himself in an attitude of defence. Not a word was exchanged between them. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... failed. But the spectacle of widespread popular demoralization, of selfish scrambles for plunder, and of feeble administration at the centre of government weighed upon him heavily. It was not the general's business to build up Congress and grapple with finance, but Washington addressed himself to the new task with his usual persistent courage. It was slow and painful work. He seemed to make no progress, and then it was that his spirits sank at the prospect ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... call them human beavers and hint that their country may float off any day at high tide, we can also feel proud, and say they have proved themselves heroes and that their country will not float off while there is a Dutchman left to grapple it. ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Science, the Grange, the State and local Teachers' Associations, and many other organizations in which women have come to perform so prominent a part. In these organizations, and in the part they take in discussions, they show their capacity to grapple with the political, social, and scientific problems of the day, in such a manner as to demonstrate their ability to perform the highest duties of citizenship. Still the chief influence which is bringing about a growth of opinion in favor ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... was gone. But in that moment I had swept my companion behind a rock and with sword advanced leapt straight for the tree; and there, in the half-light, came on a fantastic shape and closed with it in deadly grapple. My rusty sword had snapped short at the first onset, yet twice I smote with the broken blade, while arm locked with arm we writhed and twisted. To and fro we staggered and so out into the moonlight, and I saw my opponent for an Indian. His long ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... on 'Rationalism, Ritualism, and Pure Religion,' or some such title, and have read it with interest, attention, and a good deal of admiration of its ability and, on the whole, of its spirit. But I can see from it that he is not the man to grapple with the scepticism of the age. He has not sufficient sympathy with it, he has not lived in its atmosphere, he has not visited its profoundest or tossed in its stormiest depths. Intellectually and logically he understands it as he understands most other matters, but ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... is the great point—it will open the cosmopolitan outlook to countless thousands who could never hope to grapple successfully with even one national language. This cannot be a ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... at that period of his intellectual life, the softness of our Helicon descended as healing dews. In his turbulent and unsettled ambition, in his vague grapple with the giant forms of political truths, in his bias towards the application of science to immediate practical purposes, this lovely vision of the Muse came in the white robe of the Peacemaker; and with upraised hand, pointing to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Gladstone's Cabinet, he carried through Parliament, two years after which the Ballot Act was introduced by him; in 1874 he visited the United States, and on his return was elected Lord Rector of Aberdeen University; as Irish Secretary in 1880 he made an earnest effort to grapple with the Irish problem, but losing the support of his colleagues, over the imprisonment of Mr. Parnell and other Land League leaders, he resigned; he was married to Jane, eldest daughter of Dr. Arnold of Rugby; his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sliding from the canvass—buildings had not the true point of view, and foreshortening was only rudely attempted. Stefano Fiorentino, a grandson of Giotto, was the first and only one of the school who endeavoured to grapple with this last difficulty, which he may be said to have perceived rather than overcome; his contemporaries, for the most part, evaded it, and concealed their deficiency as they could. Such is the summary of the merits of this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... faint with the blow and half-blinded with the blood that poured down over his right eye. He clapped his hand, with a soldier's instinct, to the place where his sword-hilt was not, and then staggered, rather than rushed, at his assailant, to grapple him with his naked hands. Offitt struck him once more, and he fell headlong on the floor, in the blaze of a myriad lights that flashed all at once into deep ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... fight have I fought in my youth," he said, "and now once more will I, the guardian of my people, seek the combat. I would not bear any sword or other weapon against the dragon if I thought that I could grapple with him as I did with the monster Grendel. But I fear that I shall not be able to approach so close to this foe, for he will send forth hot, raging fire and venomous breath. Yet am I resolute in mood, fearless and resolved not to yield one ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... government—and we consequently hear of no distress or disorganization among them; yet it is not to be doubted that as many causes for interference occur in that body as in our own, but education, discipline, and a well-regulated system for their poor enable them to grapple with every question of good or evil, whether of retrogression or ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... for an instant only; then, without uttering a word, he aimed a blow full at Rokoa's head. The latter caught it in his open palm, wrenched the weapon from him, and, adroitly foiling a furious attempt which he made to grapple with him, once more stood upon the defensive with an unruffled aspect and not the slightest appearance of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber-door. One blow would beat it in. 'You might do murder before you know it,' Tackleton had said. How could it be murder, if he gave the villain time to grapple with him hand to hand! He was the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... movements. Sherman's part in the great plan has already been traced. The hardest task, that of facing Lee, the hero of Vicksburg and Chattanooga [he] reserved for himself. Greek thus met Greek, and the death-grapple began. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... felt better prepared to grapple with Rapperschwyll for the possession of the secret. For five days he lay in wait for the Swiss physician. On the sixth day the desired opportunity unexpectedly ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... would be a powerful attack by infantry, for which the cannonade was supposed to have paved the way with death and disorder, and it was necessary that the pieces should be kept cool in order to be in efficient condition to grapple with and suppress this attack. Sometimes a regiment, stung to a frenzy of courage by bullets and the death of comrades, will rise from its trench without the volition of its officers, and go frantically forward against overwhelming odds. A ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... Thorliek claimed as his and his father's own all the money the freedman had made. Hrut heard this, and he and his sons liked it very ill. They were most of them grown up, and the band of kinsmen was deemed a most forbidding one to grapple with. Hrut fell back on the law as to how this ought to turn out, and when the matter was searched into by lawyers, Hrut and his son stood at but little advantage, for it was held a matter of great weight that Hrut had set the freedman down without leave ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... I thank you. But I hope you will not come too near, for fear some accident might take place which would be disagreeable to you.' And, with a wave of his trumpet, the kedge-anchors went up to our yard-arms, ready to grapple the enemy. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... a spirit of dogged fatalism, he sat still and waited. To his disordered mind it seemed that footsteps were moving about the house, but they had no terrors for him. To grapple with a man for life and death would be play; to kill him, joy unspeakable. He sat still, listening. He heard rats in the walls and a babel of jeering voices on the stair-case. The whole blackness of the room with the devilish, writhing thing on the floor became invested with supernatural significance. ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... time, and Ward kept beating his leg with the paper wand in his hand. "Watts," said the general, finally, "I know what it was—it was youth. John Barclay had to go through that period. He had to fight and wrangle and grapple with life as he did. Do you remember that night the Minneola fellows came up with their ox team and their band of killers to take the county records—" and there was more of it—the old story of the town's wild days that need not be recorded, and in the end, in answer to some query from the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... from his instant of surprise. With a cry which was indeed like the bellow of an old range bull, he rushed into grapple, sure of his superior strength against a younger and ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... altercations, and equally spasmodic renewals of friendship, which took place between him and his best friends. His courage was extraordinary. Thus we find him writing: "Though at times I shall be the most miserable of God's creatures, I will grapple with Fate, it shall never pull me down." On the artistic side this affliction had its compensations in that it isolated the composer from outer distractions, and allowed him to lay entire stress on the spiritual inner side of his art; certainly ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding |
